broken leg

seaweed mind floating
clown fish ducking coral
my magnified eyes.

the coffee habit is getting worse or the dreams more clingy and demanding.  i can't shake the night like i used to.  i called annie on tuesday to tell her i most certainly broke my leg.  she paused and shook her head, shifted her weight onto her left side because her right hip gives her trouble.  i called her, not paid her a visit, and still i can picture her reactions exactly.  of course, she didn't believe me.  a broken leg, a broken leg.  yes, a broken leg.  i pinned the phone to my ear with my shoulder and licked the paper to number eight hand rolled cigarettes that day.  i roll my own because i'm cheap and because i like to think the loose leaf tobacco is healthier for you and i like to think that if i must roll my own i won't smoke as much.  truth is, with a broken leg, there isn't much else to do. 

annie didn't like my haiku.  she said it was nice, really nice.  if i wanted my writing to be nice i would have gone into business or political science.  but i was a poetry major, a poetry major who didn't really like poetry at all.  however, when you're told you have a knack for verse, when enough people tell you, you start to believe it.  i never felt it though, never felt the joy that some writers experience from a good day of writing.  i never felt moved to write above all else.  it never pained me or racked my mind.  in fact, i see very little of myself in the writing.  it's not like a broken leg, you feel one with a broken leg, you feel connected.

i'm a published poet a few times over.  annie was the first to publish me in a small literary journal she worked for through the community college.  she believes in my writing but not my broken leg.  i don't understand the world.  i say world because annie is so like the rest of them.  maybe my pain medication is making me misanthropic, but truly, the world has gone mad, mad.  in fact, part of me is happy to have a broken leg so i don't have to run the rat race with the rest of them.  another part of me thinks i should break the other leg so that when my building is set ablaze by the growing riots in the city, i won't be able to run away, i'll fall, just as so many iconic others. 

annie tells me i should use this story, this image, this delusion as fodder for my next poem.  broken leg.  two words i've latched onto she says, two words that i must free myself of.  but, but, but, but, i try to explain, this isn't poetry, this is my life.  i broke my leg.  i'm in a cast.  i'm in so much pain, i barely can move, but i called you.  i'm smoking again, okay, still.  but life is poetry annie whispers like she said something wonderful and profound, as if art was this divine, enlightened state.  life is not poetry.  poetry sometimes is life.  but most days a broken leg is simply the discontinuation of part of the femur from its other part.  some people romanticize everything.  i let the phone drop into my lap.  annie is trying to calm me in that ti chi way of hers.  i light my cigarette and let her voice grow louder and more frustrated, then tired and apathetic.  a little symphony of emotions. 

crack and snap and wrap
up the bone that once was whole
mend and sew and sew.